Space Reflection

I can never wrap my head around how large the universe is and how we are looking back in time while looking at the stars. The speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s or 671,000,000 mph. Since light travels so quickly, we don’t experience delays in everyday life. In comparison, the speed of sound is 343 m/s or 767mph. Think of the delay that happens between lightning and thunder. If a storm is far away, there will be a greater gap between the lightweight and the thunder we hear. If a storm is close, there is a small or even nonexistent gap. However, the universe is so huge that we are viewing what some stars looked like millions of years ago. A light-year is the distance light can travel in a year which is roughly equivalent to 6 trillion miles. Icarus (pictured below), the farthest individual star that was ever visible, is 9 billion light-years away from earth, which means when someone views the star, they are looking at how Icarus looked 9 billion years ago.